Ruth Richards

Mood Swings and Creativity

ABSTRACT: This article evaluates recent evidence for an association between creativity and bipolar mood disorders. Eminent creativity and everyday creativity are distinguished, with high rates of major mood disorders‐particularly bipolar disorders— appearing among eminent creators in the arts. However, among everyday persons, including the 4–5% of the population that may develop a bipolar “spectrum”; disorder and their relatives, it is those with relatively milder mood disorders and normalcy who may show the greatest creative advantage. These seemingly conflicting results are reconciled through comparison of research designs and the creativity and diagnostic variables studied. Evidence regarding mood states that enhance creativity is also considered, both for eminent and everyday creators, and some preliminary results from a study of patients are presented. Here, milder mood elevations were tied most closely to the experience of creativity, although other patterns can exist. Three patterns are examined in...

Seeing beyond: Issues of creative awareness and social responsibility

Abstract: How do we keep our eyes open to deal with the dangers threatening our world? This article looks at four types of potential blindness limiting us—as a species—from full awareness. These include difficulty seeing hazardous but slow changes, seeing heretofore unimagined dangers, seeing past our delimited reference groups to the needs of our species, and use of massive psychological defense to avoid the discomfort of awareness. Creative persons may have an edge in addressing these limitations because of their sustained cognitive‐affective awareness, creative courage and resilience, and capacity for universal perspective‐taking. Yet these capabilities do not guarantee the motivation for moral responsibility, nor its underlying reasoning and sustaining passion. A relational style of moral responsibility, growing out of everyday empathetic concerns, and expanding to embrace universal principles, provides the strongest framework for this, while helping to eliminate the distortions of a pseudo‐morality. ...

Recurrence risks in schizophrenia: Are they model dependent?

A trait such as schizophrenia, for which there is evidence of a strong genetic component but no fit to simple Mendelian modes of inheritance, presents several problems to the genetic counselor. Counseling with average empirical figures ignores specific family history and the possibility of genetic heterogeneity, yet precise estimates of risk are not possible since the mode of inheritance is not known. Two other complicating factors are present: (1) adoption studies suggest that a schizophrenia spectrum of phenotypes with a common genetic basis may exist, and (2) analysis of the family data on schizophrenia has shown almost equivalent fit to extremely different genetic models, i.e., the single-major-locus (SML) and the multifactorial-polygenic (MFP) models. Using two solutions to the SML model and a single MFP solution, we have incorporated thresholds for two milder “spectrum” phenotypes, borderline schizophrenia and schizoid personality, and computed the recurrence risks predicted by these models in several hypothetical pedigrees. The results demonstrate that (1) recurrence risks for schizophrenia are frequently model dependent even when those models fit the available data equally well, (2) when a schizophrenia spectrum is assumed it is extremely important to make precise diagnoses in relatives close to the individual at risk, and (3) collection of a more complete family history may appreciably alter the computed recurrence risk. These findings illustrate the inadequacies of current empirical data for genetic counseling for schizophrenia.

A Creative Alchemy

Can creativity change us for the better? Let us hope so, for then our job is not simply to keep some unprincipled creators in rein (these malevolent creators do indeed exist; Cropley et al., 2010), while convincing others to put more effort toward a greater good. The task instead may be to help us all unfold our deepest and most positive potential.

PREDICTORS OF ACHIEVEMENT IN A MODEL TWO‐YEAR COLLEGE

In order to identify factors related, to academic success at a model two‐year college, creativity, SATs, and high school GPA were factor analyzed, as were academic motivation variables, and included with sex in a step‐wise regression with college GPA as the criterion. Subjects were 278 freshmen at a two‐year “cluster college” for educationally marginal students. Predictors included scholastic aptitude, high school achievement, creative thinking ability, and academic motivation measures. The multiple R was .60; .54 upon cross‐validation. Although SAT scores did not correlate with high school grades, they were relatively strong predictors for college grades. High school grades also predicted for college grades entering second after SAT scores. Creative ability was a significant and stable low‐positive predictor, third in importance following SAT and high school GPA measures. The positive nature of this relationship is important as it is rare in a college population. Certain dimensions of achievement motivat...